Tom Cutterham

30 July 2024

Americans have always had some trouble with the family. If revolutionaries in the eighteenth century took seriously Thomas Paine’s excoriation of hereditary power, or their own declaration that “all men are created equal,” they were bound to feel uneasy with the fact that power, wealth, and status continued to be handed down unequally across the generations. The hereditary status of enslavement was one aspect of this problem. Another was the role family power played in the new nation’s politics. For people like Angelica Schuyler, as I argue in this summer’s JER, the project of revolutionary state-building was scarcely distinguishable from the construction of American dynasties, especially her own.

Mrs. John Barker Church (Angelica Schuyler), Child, and Servant. Painted by John Trumbull, ca. 1785. Wikimedia Commons.

To recognize the significance of dynasty in the United States’ political and social history is to cut against a powerful mythology with deep roots of its own. For Louis Hartz, the tendency of the American liberal tradition was towards “the wholesale denial of family.” His precursor and muse, Alexis de Tocqueville, had claimed that “in America the family . . . does not exist,” at least not in the “Roman and aristocratic” sense. Somehow, the American family was supposed to exist in a parallel world, unconnected to the flows of wealth and influence that actually shape people’s lives. Hence, in Hartz’s words, Americans’ “obsession with the log-cabin myth of Lincoln” and with allegedly self-made millionaires.[1]

Yet like any repressed contradiction in the psyche, dynastic narratives return persistently to haunt American mass culture. Luke Skywalker, it turned out, was never just a farm boy. Uncovering the secrets of forgotten lineage, by means of painstaking genealogy or high-tech genomic testing, is a pastime now worth billions of dollars. Hollywood nepo babies and Ivy League legacy admissions churn up media clicks, while presidential children become both targets and combatants in political proxy wars. This election year even boasts its own Kennedy—how’s that for the inescapability of dynasty in the United States?

The four seasons of HBO’s Succession were perhaps the most forthright recent effort (at least since The Sopranos) to address via mass culture the troubling status of American dynasticism. I sometimes can’t help but put Angelica Schuyler in Shiv Roy’s shoes, or vice versa, and her upwardly mobile husband John Barker Church in Tom Wambsgans’. But without giving too much away, Succession’s conclusion presents a traditional Whig narrative: the supersession of the hopelessly outmoded feudal family by abstract market forces and their human representatives. If that story were so true, would it really still need telling again now? On the contrary, as wealth inequality continues to grow, the persistence of the old regime seems more assured than ever.

Angelica’s son Philip (at five or six years old). Portrait of Philip Church by John Trumbull, 1784. Wikimedia Commons

Angelica Schuyler and her family knew there were many people in the new United States who resented the status, fortune, and power they had accrued. Scandal, she reassured her sister Elizabeth Hamilton during the Reynolds affair of 1797, was the price that must be paid for dynastic greatness. Republicans at the turn of the century were mobilizing rhetoric, drawn in part from the French Revolution, which aimed to undermine the kinship-based natural aristocracy nurtured by Washington’s and Adams’s administrations. At the same time, however, those same Republicans were watering down the redistributive and egalitarian ideals that truly threatened the basis of that class.

Too impressed by Jeffersonians’ grand claims about themselves, historians have sometimes written as though their victory in 1800 ended the problem of American dynasty. Those on the losing end of struggles for equality throughout the next two centuries were not so sure. There’s no escaping the contradiction between the ideals of family and meritocracy, though some eugenicists have tried. For those truly committed to some version of the former, it might be best in the end to do away with the latter altogether. Rather than choose between Shiv and Tom, between hereditary right and naked self-interest, we would all be much better off in a world where basic equality consigned them both to history.

Endnotes

[1] Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Orlando, FL, 1991), 213; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1994), 192.